Daily Archives: April 25, 2004

I’ve started leaving G4TV on in the background while I study or grade. Is it just me, or is the way the show Filter is set up vaguely offensive or at the very least creepy? For those that don’t know, the show is basically a Top Ten List show where they count down the Ten Best/Worst/Most games. Sometimes it will be the ten best fighting games, or the ten best boss battles, or whatever. Anyway, I recently noticed that every episode they have the host, DianeMizota dressed up in a costume appropriate to the theme of the list.

If you think of the implications of that, its kind of creepy. So here she is, a person with no identity except that which the game gives her. It seems so weird. She is this empty vessel, which the producers fill with whatever the theme of the day is. Now certainly, that isn’t much different than ET on MTV or any of a million other shows, but do we really need to see a woman dressed up like Mario? As presented, she is little more than a doll that they play dress up with and young boys are supposed to drool at. She has no agency. No will of her own. To make matters worse, she is of Asian decent, so to the vast majority of viewers, she is probably already represents the Other. Let’s not even get into the fetishization of Asian women that so many male gamers seem to exhibit. So to the demographic that G4 seems to be strongly targeting, teen age middle american boys, she is doubly othered, woman and Asian and then they proceed to make her play dress-up in these goofy outfits.

Maybe I’m being a bit paranoid, it could be a lot worse. I mean I haven’t seen them do a tribute to DOA Beach volleyball yet or anything, but I can’t help but want to change the channel every time her show comes on because I can’t bear to see what outfit she is in every episode.